Education and Inspections Bill

I would like to hear the Minister state that he recognises that the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is the way forward. That would provide consensus around this House and we could proceed in a considered way over the next few years to work out all the complications and complexities that go with that. The principle that the decision whether to issue a statement should be separated from the person providing the money, and ideally that both functions should be separated from the local education authority, goes well with the Government’s ambition that a local education authority should be seen as supportive of parents, as their friend, aide and a source of advice to them. So many other things that the Government are doing are moving in that direction, such as school advice, which we have just discussed. So much that the Government are doing enables local authorities to help parents, but this one little island remains where local authorities are in many cases set in direct conflict with parents. A system has evolved whereby parental choice is becoming restricted due to command decisions taken by local education authorities. They are not all the same; there is immense variation between LEAs, so individual parents who are not mobile between LEAs have an extremely restricted choice. Inclusion policies can vary between no favouritism for inclusion to a determination that all children should be included, making it difficult for parents to choose special schools if that is what they want. There is an extraordinary difference in attitudes to statementing. There are variations ranging from about 1 per cent in Nottinghamshire to 7 per cent in Camden. It is inconceivable that that reflects an underlying trend in the children. In fact, it is extremely well known, particularly in the case of Nottinghamshire, that that is due to a determination not to issue statements, and that if you happen to live in Nottinghamshire you have an extremely difficult time obtaining a statement of special educational needs. Well, fine. But that is not the national policy and it restricts enormously parental choice. Local education authorities perform very differently in relation to children with special educational needs in their care. I have investigated the issue of value added in primary schools. There is enormous variation between the best authority, which in 2005 was Windsor and Maidenhead, to the worst, Slough, across the river. That variation is related not to deprivation or ethnicity—at least, not as far as I can establish from the DfES data—but, as one learns from talking to the LEAs, to the degree of support that they give their schools. Those lucky enough to teach at a school in Windsor and Maidenhead are given a great deal of training as soon as they enter a school on how to deal with SEN children. As soon as a child in such a school shows characteristics that teachers feel are a bit beyond their experience and abilities to deal with, the local education authority will send in a help squad, which arrives the next day. There is immense support from that LEA for children with special educational needs, and that really shows in results. It is the only authority in England where children in primary schools with special educational needs have value added at the same level as children who do not have those needs. That points to another problem resulting from such widespread underperformance. It probably relates to a combination of factors: children are let drift for a while; schools are not as crisp as they should be on picking up the problem; when they do, the support is not there; and there is no training in many schools—that was recognised by the Cambridge study and the committee in another place. All sorts of factors inherent in schools and very much related to the LEA they happen to be in, because of the nature of its support services, affect how a child is treated. Under those circumstances, it is imperative that we move local education authorities from their preoccupation with saving money to a preoccupation with helping parents and children. The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, points the way forward in both respects. It is essential under that sort of system to have transferability of funding. That is the only way of getting reasonable parental control over whether you go for a special school, whether you bring that money into a mainstream school—as fully included or as part of a unit—and whether units develop. The Minister hymned the virtues of units within mainstream schools. I completely agree with him, but at least one local education authority—Cheshire—is abolishing all its units. Viz, fiat! Why is it able to do that? It can do it because parents have no choice. A parent cannot say, ““I want a school with a unit. Therefore, I will go to this, that or the other wonderful unit””. There is currently some extremely good unit provision in Cheshire. Parents have no choice; they cannot select that option. The funding stream remains within the control of the local education authority, which can say, ““You can go there but the funds will not follow you””. That degree of control by local education authorities, which enables them to impose blanket policies and removes choice from parents across the totality of their schools, again, goes fundamentally against many things that this Government are trying to do. We should move the choice to the child, his advisers and his parents. If the first part of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is accepted, with a local education authority being on side, I think that we will move to a much more constructive situation. My own amendment in this group merely says that schools should publish proper information about their facilities for children with special educational needs. At the moment, they are frightened of the law. The law says that they have to be totally inclusive, so, if asked, everyone says that they can do everything, but that is by absolutely no means the case. There are schools that are wonderful and know what they are talking about and there are schools that simply have not made it. That information should be available to parents. The basic information can be put in ways that are unarguable. How well trained are staff? What experience has the school had of dealing with pupils who have, say, ADHD? What forms of screening does the school operate to pick up problems? Those are establishable facts that can be published in prospectuses and can enable parents with savvy—a remarkable number of parents of children with SEN are savvy; it does not depend in any way on their background—or their advisers to pick up the signals that they need to know which schools are likely to suit their children.